[thelist] Questions for web traffic gurus

[Daniel J. Cody]

Hi Janet :)

Green, Janet wrote:

> "Most large commercial sites such as America Online... use large 'caches' on
> the machines they use to service web requests. That means that once a user
> looks up one of (their) pages, it hangs around in memory at that site in
> case someone else wants to look at it. That way, things run faster... there
> is no way whatsoever to determine exactly what effect this has on our
> numbers - it could be a factor of two, it could be orders of magnitude.
> Probably somewhere in the middle."
 

For the most part, this is more true than ever.. A lot of companies(even 
  smaller ones I work with) have started using caching more and more to 
save on bandwidth costs..


> So I am wondering... is this still true? (The article was written in 1994.)
> And, how do I find out if my in-house Windows NT/IIS server for
> www.desmoinesmetro.com does this same thing (gives subsequent visitors


Just to clarify, its (for example) AOL's servers that are caching the 
static content on www.desmoinesmetro.com , not your NT machine doing it.

> cached pages)? Are *my* reported numbers only a fraction of what Webtrends
> tells me they are? 
> 
> I'd be interested in hearing further discussion on the reliability (or lack
> thereof) of web traffic statistics. 

IMO, it depends on what kind of site you run.. if desmoinesmetro.com is all 

static content, it will get cached.. Database driven dynamic sites tend 
to get cached less(usually only the images from dynamic sites will get 
cached). Sadly, this can lead to some slight deveations in how many 
people are really visiting your site VS how many your reporting software 
says are.

Unless its a high traffic site though, that deviation should remain 
slight and not large enough to really worry about :)

shout if you have any more questions..

.djc.